The DragonFly BSD project, a former fork of FreeBSD which is now independently developed, has released a new version: DragonFly BSD 4.6.0. This new release offers a series of incremental updates, including improved accelerated video, better SMP performance and enhanced networking performance under heavy loads. "DragonFly version 4.6 brings more updates to accelerated video for both i915 and Radeon users, home-grown support for NVMe controllers, preliminary EFI support, improvements in SMP and networking performance under heavy load, and a full range of binary packages. The i915 driver has been updated to match the version found with the Linux 4.4 kernel. This gives us significantly better stability on newer CPUs, Broadwell and Skylake in particular. The Radeon driver has been updated to match Linux 3.18, and controls for the backlight are available through drm.radeon.backlight." This release of DragonFly BSD also features over 24,000 third-party ports and introduces EFI support for 64-bit x86 hardware. The release notes offer a complete list of improvements and changes since the previous stable release of DragonFly BSD 4.4. Download: dfly-x86_64-4.6.0_REL.iso.bz2 (232MB, MD5, pkglist).

Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD, the latest stable release from the BSD-derived operating system that features the Hammer file system, virtual kernels and other unique characteristics. This first point release in the stable 4.4 series is provided due to the late inclusion of an important OpenSSL security update: "DragonFly BSD 4.4 has been tagged and built. DragonFly version 4.4 brings further updates to accelerated video for both i915 and Radeon users, a new locale system, and a new default linker. Significant behind-the-scenes work has also been done, with symbol versioning, Hammer1 improvements, and other changes. Version 4.4.1 was the first release due to the late inclusion of OpenSSL update 1.0.1q. ... If you have an existing 4.2.x system and are running a generic kernel, the normal upgrade process will work. Change your local /usr/src to 4.4." See the brief release announcement and the more detailed release notes for further information. Download the installation CD image from one of the DragonFly BSD mirrors: dfly-x86_64-4.4.1_REL.iso.bz2 (209MB, MD5, pkglist).

The DragonFly BSD team has announced the launch of DragonFly BSD 4.2.0. The new release includes a number of important new features and upgrades. DragonFly BSD 4.2.0 includes GNU's GCC 5 compiler as the default system compiler, offers improved graphics support and Sendmail has been replaced by a home-grown, minimal mail transfer agent. "Sendmail has been replaced by the home-grown DragonFly Mail Agent (DMA) in the base system. DMA is not a full-featured MTA (Mail Transfer Agent), it only accepts mails from local MUA (Mail User Agents) and delivers them immediately, either locally or remotely. DMA doesn't listen to network connections on port 25. People who still need a full-featured MTA must install it from dports. OpenSMTPD, Postfix and Sendmail itself are available as binary packages." DragonFly BSD's audio stack and packet filter have been updated with code ported in from FreeBSD's development branch. More information is available in the release announcement. Download (pkglist): dfly-x86_64-4.2.0_REL.iso.bz2 (205MB, MD5).

Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 4.0.1, the first stable 4.0 build of the project's UNIX-like operating system created in 2003 by Matthew Dillon as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8: "Version 4.0.1 released 25 November 2014. Version 4 of DragonFly brings Haswell graphics support, 3D acceleration, and improved performance in extremely high-traffic networks. DragonFly now supports up to 256 CPUs, Haswell graphics (i915), concurrent pf operation, and a variety of other devices. As announced during the 3.8 release, DragonFly BSD is 64-bit only. No 32-bit installation images have been generated, and no compatibility work is being done for 32-bit systems. Changes since DragonFly 3.8: new device files /dev/upmap and /dev/kpmap have been added. These memory mappable drivers allow for a per process or common to the kernel shared memory space. The objective is to allow kernel-provided information to be directly read from memory, without having to pay the cost of a traditional system call." Read the detailed release announcement for a full list of changes. Download (MD5, pkglist): dfly-x86_64-4.0.1_REL.iso.bz2 (194MB).

Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 3.8.0, a new version of the UNIX-like operating system created in 2003 by Matthew Dillon as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8. This will be the last release supporting the i386 architecture. From the release announcement: "DragonFly release 3.8. Big-ticket items: dynamic binaries in the root file system; DragonFly binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, which makes it possible to use current identification and authentication technologies such as PAM and NSS to manage user accounts; some libraries have been moved to /lib to support this; USB4BSD is now default in DragonFly, USB3 devices are supported, though some network devices may not be recognized; the drm/i915 driver had originally been ported from FreeBSD, an ongoing synchronization work with the version present in the Linux 3.8 branch is now going on." Download (MD5) from here: dfly-x86_64-3.8.0_REL.iso.bz2 (199MB).

DragonFly BSD 3.6.0, a UNIX-like operating system created in 2003 as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8, is out: "Version 3.6.0 released." Big ticket items of the release include: "Dports, which uses the FreeBSD ports system as a base, and the 'pkg' tools for installation, is now default on DragonFly; using the parallel building of the 20,000 packages in dports as a test case, contention in the kernel has been nearly eliminated; support for newer Intel and ATI chipsets is present in the system - this may not work for every hardware combination, but a number of users have reported success with hardware-accelerated video using this update; locales and libiconv work have brought DragonFly up to date on language support, utilities should be usable in your native language." Here are the detailed release notes with upgrade instructions. Download (MD5): dfly-x86_64-3.6.0_REL.iso.bz2 (194MB). The "GUI" images are not yet ready "due to the dports switch."

Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 3.4.1, a UNIX-like operating system created in 2003 as a fork of FreeBSD 4.8: "Version 3.4 of DragonFly BSD is officially out." Big ticket items of the release include: "Experimental packaging system - dports uses the FreeBSD ports system to build ports for DragonFly and uses pkgng to manage the binary packages produced from those ports; The DragonFly snapshots are built using dports and also have Xfce for the desktop; performance improvements under extreme load - improvements in poudriere performance, tmpfs performance and CPU usage; new default compiler - the two base compilers have swapped roles, GCC 4.7, introduced as an alternative compiler with release 3.2, is now the primary compiler used to build DragonFly; new USB stack - USB4BSD." See the brief release announcement and read the detailed release notes for a full list of new features and improvements. Download (MD5): dfly-x86_64-3.4.1_REL.iso.bz2 (221MB), dfly-x86_64-gui-3.4.1_REL.iso.bz2 (991MB).

Justin Sherrill has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 3.2.1, an updated version of the BSD operating system originally forked from FreeBSD 4: "The 3.2.1 release of DragonFly BSD is available now. Significant work has gone into the scheduler to improve performance, using postgres benchmarking as a measure. See the PDF of graphed results to see the improvements. DragonFly should be now one of the best selections for PostgreSQL and other databases. USB4BSD has been incorporated into this release. More USB devices are compatible with DragonFly, and xhci (USB 3.0) users may be able to take full advantage of their newer hardware. Since this is a new feature, it is available in 3.2 but not built by default. See the release announcement and the release notes for further information. Download (mirrors, MD5) the standard CD or the "GUI" DVD images from here: dfly-i386-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2 (184MB), dfly-i386-gui-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2 (918MB), dfly-x86_64-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2 (203MB), dfly-x86_64-gui-3.2.1_REL.iso.bz2 (942MB).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 3.0.1, a major new version of the BSD operating system forked from FreeBSD in 2003: "DragonFly 3.0.1 is now available! This release has superior multiprocessor support compared to previous versions. Speed has improved significantly. Big-ticket items: previously the majority of the VM was under a single token, the vm_token, now vm_objects (mappable entities) are each under a private token, concurrent page faults in the same object can proceed, and VM SMP scalability overall is improved; a new time domain multiplexing method has been added to balance storage operation types over long time periods; ACPI + interrupt routing have been upgraded, an SMP kernel will work on all machines and is installed by default; DragonFly now has tcplay(8), a tool for creating and managing encrypted disk volumes. Read the rest of the release notes for more details. Download (mirrors, MD5) the standard CD or the "GUI" DVD images from here: dfly-i386-3.0.1_REL.iso.bz2 (180MB), dfly-i386-gui-3.0.1_REL.iso.bz2 (1,131MB), dfly-x86_64-3.0.1_REL.iso.bz2 (198MB), dfly-x86_64-gui-3.0.1_REL.iso.bz2 (1,152MB).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 2.10.1, a BSD operating system originally forked from FreeBSD 4 series: "The DragonFly BSD 2.10.1 release is now available. This release sports significant compatibility and performance improvements and many new features. Big-ticket items: this release supports a much larger variety of hardware and multiprocessor systems than previous releases, thanks to updates of ACPI and APIC and ACPI interrupt routing support; Hammer volumes can now deduplicate volumes overnight in a batch process and during live operation; Packet Filter (pf) was updated to a version based upon OpenBSD 4.4; DragonFly now uses GCC 4.4 as the default system compiler, and is the first BSD to take that step; significant performance gains over previous releases...." Read the release notes for detailed information about the changes and features in this version. Download (MD5, mirror list): dfly-i386-2.10.1_REL.iso.bz2 (185MB), dfly-x86_64-2.10.1_REL.iso.bz2 (190MB).

Matthew Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD 2.8. The release has a version number of 2.8.2 after an earlier set of ISO images numbered 2.8.1 and 2.8.1A were withdrawn due to a critical bug. The new DragonFly BSD comes as a small installation CD image or as a bootable USB image with a graphical desktop (FVWM). From the announcement: "The DragonFly 2.8 release is here! Big-ticket items: a cryptsetup compatible cryptographic device mapper target was written for DragonFly; Packet Filter (pf) was updated to a version based upon OpenBSD 4.2; FreeBSD's WiFi (802.11) network stack has been ported; the multiprocessor work that has been ongoing in DragonFly is beginning to bear fruit - the MPLOCK has been pushed back significantly." Read the detailed release notes for more information and upgrade instructions. Download (mirrors, MD5): dfly-i386-2.8.2_REL.iso.bz2 (174MB), dfly-x86_64-2.8.2_REL.iso.bz2 (182MB). The "GUI" images for USB drives are available from here: dfly-i386-gui-2.8.2_REL.img.bz2 (1,659MB), dfly-x86_64-gui-2.8.2_REL.img.bz2 (1,673MB).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 2.6.1, a BSD operating system originally forked from the FreeBSD 4.x code base: "The DragonFly 2.6 release is here! Three release options are now available for 32-bit: our bare-bones CD ISO image, a bare-bones bootable USB disk-key image (minimum 1G USB stick needed), and a GUI bootable USB disk-key image with a full X environment. The GUI USB image replaces the DVD ISO image we had in the previous release, to work around issues with DVDs simply being too slow to boot an X environment from. Two release options are available for 64-bit: our bare-bones CD ISO image and our bare-bones bootable USB disk-key image. The 64-bit release is now fully supported." Read the full release announcement which includes a complete list of changes and improvements. Download (MD5): dfly-i386-2.6.1_REL.iso.bz2 (218MB), dfly-x86_64-2.6.1_REL.iso.bz2 (232MB).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 2.4, a general-purpose operating system originally forked from FreeBSD 4.x: "The DragonFly 2.4 release is here! Three release options are now available: a bare-bones CD image, a DVD image which includes a fully operational X environment, and a bare-bones bootable USB disk-key image. In addition we will for the first time be shipping a 64-bit ISO image. 64-bit support is stable but there will only be limited 'pkgsrc' support in this release. DragonFly BSD 2.4 is a bigger release than normal. The single most invasive change is the introduction of DEVFS. The /dev file system is now mounted by the kernel after it mounts the root file system. All major and minor numbers have changed and the old /dev is no longer meaningful." Read the detailed release announcement for a complete list of changes and upgrade notes. Download (MD5): dfly-gui-2.4.0_REL.iso.gz (722MB), dfly-2.4.0_REL.img.gz (217MB), dfly-amd64-2.4.0_REL.iso.gz (219MB).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 2.2.1, a BSD operating system originally forked from FreeBSD 4: "The new 2.2 release includes Hammer, a file system that includes instant crash recovery, multi-volume file systems, data integrity checking, fine grained history retention, and the ability to mirror data to other volumes. It has undergone extensive stress-testing and is considered production-ready!" Other changes include: "Fixes for libthread_xu: MAP_STACK and an errno leak; fixed an installworld failure due to kernel fixes and a libthread_xu issue; installer now works correctly in the console, and properly creates device files if they don't exist; updates for msdosfs, pax(1), and magic(3); allowed uid/gid/flags changes to fail if running cpdup as a user...." Read the full release notes for additional details. Download (MD5): dfly-2.2.1_REL.iso.gz (184MB), dfly-gui-2.2.1_REL.iso.gz (516MB).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 2.2, a BSD operating system originally forked from FreeBSD 4.8: "The DragonFly 2.2 release is here! The HAMMER file system is considered production-ready in this release; it was first released in July 2008. The 2.2 release represents major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration, and a brand new release infrastructure with multiple target options. Three release options are now available - our bare-bones CD ISO, a DVD ISO which includes a fully operational X environment, and a bare-bones bootable USB disk-key image (less than 512M). We offer over 7,300 pre-built pkgsrc packages for this release. The pkg_radd(1) utility may be used to download pre-built binary packages. By default, this script will query the main package site for a random redirect to one of our mirrors." Read the detailed release notes for further information. Download (MD5): dfly-gui-2.2.0_REL.iso.gz (515MB), dfly-2.2.0_REL.iso.gz (183MB).

Louisa Luciani has announced the release of DragonFly BSD live DVD, an installable live image of the current DragonFly BSD development tree, which boots into Fluxbox as its graphical desktop: "The first version of the DragonFly BSD live DVD is done! Besides the full DragonFly BSD base system, the DVD includes an X desktop, a basic set of utilities and applications, and installation tools. Certain directories, are remounted read-write using MFS, and without swap this live DVD will not work well with less than 256 MB of RAM. This live DVD is meant to be useful for testing hardware compatibility, and some core aspects of the DragonFly BSD operating system. Please keep in mind though that it is undergoing development and should still be considered experimental. As always, back up important data before making any changes to your hard disk." Read the release announcement and release notes for further details and screenshots. Download: dfly-guidvd-2.1A.iso.bz2 (392MB).

Matthew Dillon announced the availability of DragonFly BSD 2.0: "2.0 is our eighth major DragonFly release. DragonFly's policy is to only commit bug fixes to release branches." Changes in this release include: the HAMMER filesystem featuring crash recovery on-mount (without fsck) and queueless incremental mirroring, numerous kernel changes like native fairq-queue implementation and native connection state recovery, various hardware changes like added drivers and better USB survivability, userland changes like blacklist for weak Debian-generated SSH keys and improved manual pages and documentation, a lot of contributed software like new versions of BIND, OpenSSH, tnftpd, and GCC. Fortran was removed from the base system, along with other old stuff like legacy device drivers. See the rather brief release announcement and the detailed 2.0 release notes for more information. Download (MD5): dfly-2.0.0_REL.iso.gz (129MB, torrent).

Matthew Dillon has announced the availability of an updated release of DragonFly BSD, version 1.12.2: "DragonFly BSD 1.12.2 released. A significant number of bug and security fixes have been merged from current to the 1.12 branch over the last two months and we have rolled a new sub-release, 1.12.2, for the benefit of our users. We recommend that 1.12 users upgrade. In addition there is a known issue related to building pkgsrc packages from source which is addressed in the above release notes. Basically the M4 package sources needs to be patched. This applies to HEAD users as well." Changes: "Fix wide symbols (wstring, wint_t etc) support in gcc41 (libstdc++); add libc support for gcc41 stack protector; update bzip2 to 1.0.5...." See the release announcement and release notes for further details and errata issues. Download (MD5): dfly-1.12.2_REL.iso.gz (124MB).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 1.12, a BSD operating system originally forked from FreeBSD 4 in order to develop a radically different approach to concurrency, SMP, and most other kernel sub-systems. "We are happy to say that the 1.12 release is now available! This release is primarily a maintenance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel. The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year. Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER file system is almost at the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release." Read the release announcement and check out the detailed release notes for a complete list of changes. Download: dfly-1.12.0_REL.iso.gz (118MB, MD5).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 1.10: "DragonFly 1.10 has been released!" From the release notes: "1.10 is our sixth major DragonFly release. Several big-ticket items are present in this release. Our default ATA driver has been switched to NATA (ported from FreeBSD). NATAs big claim to fame is support for AHCI which is the native SATA protocol standard. It is far, far better than the old ATA/IDE protocol. DragonFly now has non-booting support for GPT partitioning and 64-bit disklabels. Non-booting means we don't have boot support for these formats yet. DragonFly's Light Weight Process abstraction is now finished and working via libthread_xu but the default threading library is not quite ready to be changed from libc_r yet." Read the release announcement and release notes for further details. Download: dfly-1.10.0_REL.iso.gz (112MB, MD5).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 1.8.1: "The DragonFly BSD 1.8.1 release is ready. Release notes: security updates for BIND, File, libmagic, and TCPDUMP; X.Org added to various paths, including periodic directories for cron and manual paths; the dynamic loader now properly searches objects, solving problems with a number of pkgsrc applications; the fwe network interface is now properly dependant on Firewire; a bug in Vinum was fixed; update the EST module (CPU voltage / frequency reporting); the virtual kernel now properly handles spurious SIGTRAPs; MFC a bug fix for SMBFS which fixes a kernel panic." Please see the complete release notes for further details. Download: dfly-1.8.1_REL.iso.gz (96.3MB, MD5).

Matthew Dillon has announced the release of DragonFly BSD 1.8: "1.8 is our fifth major DragonFly release. DragonFly's policy is to only commit bug fixes to release branches. The biggest kernel change in this release is the addition of virtual kernel support and a virtual kernel build target (VKERNEL). Virtual kernels are systems-in-a-box... you can run a complete kernel as a userland process. All standard non-hardware-specific applications will run inside the virtual kernel. Performance depends on how heavily an application interacts with the VM system and how often it makes system calls, since these operations have to bed forwarded by the real kernel to the virtual kernel." Find more information in the comprehensive release notes. Download: dfly-1.8.0_REL.iso.gz (96.3MB, MD5).

DragonFly BSD 1.6 has been released: "1.6 is our fourth major DragonFly release. DragonFly's policy is to only commit bug fixes to release branches. The biggest user-visible changes in this release are a new random number generator, a massive reorganisation of the 802.11 (wireless) framework, and extensive bug fixes in the kernel. We also made significant progress in pushing the big giant lock inward and made extensive modifications to the kernel infrastructure with an eye towards DragonFly's main clustering and userland VFS goals. We consider 1.6 to be more stable then 1.4." Find more details in the comprehensive announcement. Download: dfly-1.6.0_REL.iso.gz (94.0MB, MD5). DragonFly BSD is a fork of FreeBSD 4.x series, representing a logical continuation of the branch that proved itself to be one of the most stable and reliable FreeBSD releases ever built.

DragonFly BSD 1.4 has been released: "1.4 is our third major DragonFly release. This release represents a significant milestone in our efforts to improve the kernel infrastructure. DragonFly is still running under the Big Giant Lock, but this will probably be the last release where that is the case. The greatest progress has been made in the network subsystem. The TCP stack is now almost fully threaded (and will likely be the first subsystem we remove the BGL from in coming months). The TCP stack now fully supports the SACK protocol and a large number of bug and performance fixes have gone in, especially in regard to GigE performance over LANs." Find more details in the comprehensive release notes. Download (MD5): dfly-1.4.0_REL.iso.gz (81.4MB). DragonFly BSD is a fork of FreeBSD 4.x series, representing a logical continuation of the branch that proved itself to be one of the most stable and reliable FreeBSD releases ever built.

The second major release of DragonFly BSD is out: "This release represents a significant milestone in our efforts to improve the kernel infrastructure. DragonFly is still running under the Big Giant Lock, but this will probably be the last release where that is the case. The greatest progress has been made in the network subsystem. The TCP stack is now almost fully threaded... It goes without saying that this release is far more stable than our 1.0A release. A huge number of bug fixes, performance improvements, and design changes have been made since the 1.0A release." Find the release sites and the full release notes on dragonflybsd.org. Download: dfly-1.2.0_REL.iso.gz (81.5MB).

NewsForge has published a review of the recently released DragonFly BSD 1.0A: "I'm impressed with the efforts of Matt Dillon and the rest of the DragonFly team -- I think they've come a long way in a relatively short period of time. If they can manage to continue on the same track, DragonFly will easily overshadow FreeBSD in terms of technical merit, code quality, and performance. At this point I would not consider it for production use, as it just doesn't seem to work very well and it's difficult to ascertain which Ports will install and which will error out." The full story.

The first stable version of DragonFly BSD is out: "One year after starting the project as a fork off the FreeBSD-4.x tree, the DragonFly Team is pleased to announce our 1.0 release! We've made remarkable progress in our first year. We have replaced nearly all of the core threading, process, interrupt, and network infrastructure with DragonFly native subsystems. We have our own MP-friendly slab allocator, a Light Weight Kernel Threading (LWKT) system that is separate from the dynamic userland scheduler, a fine-grained system timer abstraction for kernel use...." Find the full announcement on dragonflybsd.org. Download: dfly-1.0REL.iso.gz (78.6MB); also available via BitTorrent. Update: Release updated to 1.0a (78.6MB) to fix a serious fdisk/slice issue with the installer. An xdelta patch is also available for people who have downloaded the original 1.0REL iso.

3CX Phone System is a specialist, Debian-based Linux distribution designed to run a complete unified communications platform. The 3CX client, included in the distribution, can also be installed separately on most hardware as well as the cloud. It provides a complete open standards-based IP PBX and phone system that works with popular SIP trunks and IP phones. It will automatically configure all supported peripherals and it also comes with clients for Windows, OS X, iOS and Android. The ISO image includes a free license for the 3CX PBX edition. The ISO images contains the standard Debian installer which installs a minimal system with the nginx web server, PostgreSQL database, iptables firewall and Secure Shell. Options not relevant to 3CX have been removed form the distribution. Download the installation ISO image from here: debian-8.6.0-amd64-netinst-3cx.iso (246MB).

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